Common Information Model (“CIM”) is a standard set forth by the Distributed Management Task Force (“DMTF”) that allows for a common model of providing information regardless of hardware or operating system (“OS”) platform. CIM provides a common definition of management information for systems, networks, applications and services and allows for vendor extensions thereto. CIM is a vendor-agnostic industry management standard. A CIM object manager (“CIMOM”) is a server comprising a combination of hardware and software for servicing CIM requests.
A Common Information Model (“CIM”) provider provides on a CIM platform data representing a single entity. In the case of hardware, there will theoretically be an instance of a CIM object representing each component, including, for example, each processor, video card, etc. Hardware data is derived from multiple sources, including, but not limited to, Intelligent Platform Management Interface (“IPMI”), Hardware Abstraction Layer (“HAL”), System Management BIOS (“SMBIOS”), sysfs, and proprietary third party sources. Each of these sources has its own interface, some of which are very complex. There could be a representation of each component in only one, many, or all of the available data sources.
CIM promises a single interface to obtain the information about such components; however, the CIM provider requires a component profile provider to aggregate all of the data sources into a single CIM instance. This would traditionally require that for each component entity type (CIM provider), a profile provider would have to know how to interface with each of the data sources and aggregate that data into a single object.